Democrats: Unforeseen Eugene

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Son of an Irish-descended livestock dealer and a German-descended moth er, he was born 52 years ago next week in the farm hamlet of Watkins, Minn. (pop. 744). Gene whipped through St. John's prep school and university at Collegeville in a total of six years instead of eight, getting A's in everything but trigonometry, starring in hockey and baseball. One of the few mementos in his office is the bat that he used to win a Senate-House baseball game for the upper chamber with a home run. Another is a bas-relief plaque of St. Thomas More, the man who, for all seasons, is the Senator's hero.

McCarthy gulped deep draughts of liberal politics and theology from the Benedictines at St. John's, later returned to the order as a novice. After a year of isolation, he left the novitiate to marry Abigail Quigley, a handsome, brilliant girl from Wabasha, Minn., whom he met while teaching high school in North Dakota. She has since be come a leading advocate of ecumenism, is one of the two Catholics on the National Board of United Church Women.

McCarthy's Mavericks. McCarthy returned to the secular world during a time of political ferment in Minnesota. Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman and other liberal Democrats were engaged in a bitter struggle to coalesce the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties and root out the Communists who infested both. McCarthy, then teaching sociology and economics at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, joined the struggle. By 1948 he had helped Humphrey's coalition take command of the new party, decided to run for Congress, went on to win the first of five terms.

In 1952, he had the temerity to debate his namesake, Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy, on a radio program. "The moderator told me that the only reason he asked me to oppose McCarthy was that he could not get anybody else," recalls Gene. When campaign time rolled around, the Minnesotan was smeared as a Communist by supporters of his opponent. Nevertheless, he won by 37,000 votes.

To combat the Republican-Southern Democratic coalition that flourished in the House in the mid-1950s, McCarthy formed a liberal discussion group that later evolved into a formal bloc. Reminiscent of a similar group founded in the 1930s by Texas Congressman Maury Maverick, it was tagged "McCarthy's Mavericks." After McCarthy went to the U.S. Senate in 1959, having ousted a two-term G.O.P. incumbent, the McMavericks evolved into the still-functioning Democratic Study Group.

Though the more baronial Senate sniffs at the feet-on-the-desk atmosphere of the House, McCarthy remained his old self, relaxed, languid, sardonic and urbane. Many of his colleagues, however, resented his occasionally professorial air. "He gives the impression that we aren't quite as smart as we ought to be," said one. He focused on a few major issues—taxation, agriculture and congressional overseeing of the Central Intelligence Agency—but no major bill bore his name.